Combining content from Origins and Awakening into Dragon Age II was “harder than one might think,” says Gaider

Dragon Age writer David Gaider has said it was “harder than one might think,” to combine content from Origins and Awakening into Dragon Age II in a sensible fashion.

Speaking in an interview with Bitmob, Gaider said this presented a challenged due to the plot of the second game only being “tangentially related to the first.”

“It didn’t involve the same main character and didn’t take place in the same location,” he said. “So we could refer to events that occurred elsewhere, and occasionally have characters appear, but didn’t want to force the connections to a point where it seemed unrealistic.

“Of the things that we did fit in, it was a matter of trying to track all the different choices from Origins and Awakening and figuring out which choices we could or should accommodate. Accommodating them all just isn’t feasible, but neither is ignoring every decision and having no ties to the previous game just so we don’t contravene anything. It’s a tricky situation.”

Gaider went on to say that the developer’s “primary mission,” was to “provide bonuses for the player who did import their previous decisions,” in order to acknowledge their accomplishments.

He said the team also threw in “some nods to characters and stories they were already familiar with,” without giving anyone the impression that they needed to play Origins in order to understans what was going on in Dragon Age II.